US focuses internally on war on drugs

President Barack Obama's plan to fight Mexican drug cartels in the southwestern US acknowledges that a domestic effort is needed in the cross-border war on illegal narcotics, experts say.

The plan unveiled on Tuesday includes sending more anti-drug agents to the region, cracking down on money laundering, adding more intelligence efforts to disrupt Mexican drug cartel operatives and new high-tech equipment to search for illegal drugs.

It comes in response to an increase in drug-related violence in Mexico, where more than 5,300 people were killed last year, many of them in border cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.

US authorities have done little in the past to crack down on money laundering or weapons smuggled into Mexico, said Oscar Martinez, a border expert at the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Washington "has to be an active partner" if Mexican President Felipe Calderon's effort to destroy his country's powerful illegal drug cartels is to succeed, said Mr Martinez.

"You can't fight a drug war without both countries participating," he said.

The US, the world's largest consumer of illegal narcotics, shares an often-porous 3,000-plus kilometre frontier with Mexico.

The plan announced on Tuesday is "a great improvement ... over arresting meat packers and sewing plant workers and calling that homeland security," said Josiah Heyman, a border expert at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Since the early 1990s US border policy has focused on "halting labour migration ... in an undirected way, and not paying attention to the flow of money and the flow of weapons back and forth across the border", said Mr Heyman.

Over the past years billions of dollars have been allocated to raise walls along the border and bolster the Border Patrol, doubling its size to 18,000 over the past eight years. The Obama measures, which zero in on the drug cartels, tackle "a real focused security threat", said Mr Heyman.

Trust between US and Mexican law enforcement officials is a key stumbling block. Lawmakers fear aid money can be pocketed, and US agents have long said they are reluctant to share information with their Mexican counterparts out of fears of corruption.

"I think we have been overly critical of the Mexican government - you have to allow for some corruption when you deal with these things", and cannot use that as an excuse to minimise cooperation, remarked Mr Martinez.

And if some of the aid to Mexico is lost, "well, a huge amount of money going to Wall Street has been lost, so why are we being so hypocritical here?" he asked.

Both Mr Martinez and Maureen Meyer, with the Washington Office on Latin America, also noted that US agents have also been involved in corruption cases. "It's not just a Mexican problem," said Mr Meyer.

For decades Mexico has complained that Washington is doing little about weapons sold on US soil and then smuggled into Mexico for drug cartels use.

US officials have "never really made an effort" to follow traffic southbound, Mr Heyman said, and local US border residents are not accustomed to southbound inspections.

Increased southbound inspections would likely increase border delays and could impact trade, remarked Mr Heyman.

He suggested new areas at border crossings where suspicious southbound cars and trucks can be separated for inspection. "There is going to be some transition that's going to be a challenge," he said.

Mexico and the US, along with Canada, are partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico is the second largest US trade partner, after Canada.

Every year there are some 4.5 million commercial border land crossings, mostly large trucks moving goods between the two neighbours, according to US government figures.